Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

Runaway general

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Anybody have any thoughts on Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

On first glance, the dude seems like a gen-yoo-wine ass-kicking samurai cross-bred with the kind of political general who has the shrunken yellow heart of a REMF but likes to dress up as G.I. Joe. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight him, but neither would I care to follow him into anything more dangerous than a briefing room.

A casual Google doesn’t turn up much in the way of a real combat record, and the much-hyped Rolling Stone story sure doesn’t answer many questions. It paints him as some class of Zen archer, if Zen archers also happened to be egomaniacs. Col. Walter E. Kurtz comes to mind, as does Julius Caesar. Maybe George Armstrong Custer.

My shoot-from-the-hip observation is that he’s another one of these ivory-tower dudes who has a theory he’d like to prove if you don’t mind contributing a few of your friends, neighbors and family members to the experiment.

Must be fun to be in the White House right about now, eh? Can him or keep him, it’s gonna be nothing but incoming.

• Late update: The Los Angeles Times has failed to distinguish itself on many occasions in recent years, but this aside in a straight news story about the McChrystal contretemps that should display no bias is particularly appalling:

Obama, who has not served in the military, has sought to solidify his status as commander in chief through frequent appearances with troops. Such appearances have sought to convey that he has the confidence of the American military.

Uh huh. No wonder these cocksuckers declined to hire me as a copy editor back in the Eighties, ’cause I would’ve folded that paragraph into a conical shape and shoved it up someone’s ass.

Well, dipshits, like it or not, he is the CINC, and you don’t have to go back very far to find CINCs who liked to be photographed hanging around with the grunts, feeding them plastic turkeys. Let’s hope that this one is less eager to feed them into the meat grinder.

A call-up and a smackdown

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Floyd Landis — yes, that Floyd Landis — got a call-up at the start of yesterday’s 50th edition of the Nevada City Classic. Oooooooooo-kay.

I heard more than a few people booing as I watched via streaming Innertubes video and wondered idly whether they were (a) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar getting a call-up; (2) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being there at all, or (iii) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being a rat-fink tweetie-boid stool pigeon and a Friend of Cancer.

The field wasn’t as deep as last year’s, with Big Tex and his sidekicks having a previous engagement, but there was still some muscle there — Bissell’s Ian Boswell and Paul Mach, who went one-two in the finale, and 2005 champ Burke Swindlehurst (Team Give-Blackbottoms).

And Landis was a player, helping reel in what looked to be the race-winning move by Swindlehurst and finishing just off the podium in fourth. Don’t s’pose they dope-tested him or nothin’ afterward to see whether he was getting his testosterone from his balls instead of a bottle these days.

We can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
We have a new champion in the Upperclass Twit of the Year Show, and it ain't Nigel Incubator-Jones.

Meanwhile, from our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Department comes this item about British Petroleum’s Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward pissing off to the southern coast of England to watch his yacht compete in the (wait for it) J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, which circumnavigates the Isle of Wight. It sounds like a Monty Python skit.

On the one hand, it’s almost refreshing to watch a capitalist who really and truly does not give one runny shit about the proles with whom he is condemned to share a planet.

On the other, fuck this guy.

WordPressed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Looks like the comments done went and shut theyselfs off again, dagnabbit. All this new-fangled technology ain’t worth a warm bucket ‘a spit, you ask me. It’s a helluva world when the damn’ software makes the meatware’s decisions without so much as a by-your-leave.

A casual search through the WordPress forums finds many references to this issue, but no solutions. And since VeloNews.com is also a WordPress construct and has many of its own interesting gremlins, I’m not certain that upgrading to v3.0 of the software will solve my problem.

Anyway, the yak factory should be back in business, for recent posts, anyway. When this happens the only way to re-enable comments — which are supposed to be permanently enabled for everyone who has had one previous observation approved by the Sultan of the Sandbox, to wit, Your Humble Narrator — is to go into every post, click the comments-permitted box, save the post, rinse and repeat. Life, short, etc.

Until the next time, then, you may fire at will.